The school, built in 1962, was a first class education facility that
looked like new.

It was also the school where I’d spent four years of my
adolescence, some forty years ago.
I was surprised the news shook me as much as it did.

I’d been outside Ontario for 25 years and had never gone back
to a single reunion.
So, on final Open House day, June 3rd, I was more than a little
curious.
Thus started the adventure recounted in this film.

Over the following year, I talked to people from three different
generations of Midland students,
people who were there in the sixties, in the late eighties, and then
when it closed.

I also talked to former trustees, parents, teachers, academics, trying
to find out why this
apparently absurd event had taken place, and what its closing meant.

It was not just, I thought, the result of penny pinching by the Harris
government.
There was a sea change of attitudes taking place, movements of
population and priorities
which were affecting the urban fabric of the place where I’d
grown up and probably
all of Ontario.

This film is a hommage to a school and a school system which worked
pretty well for my generation,
and which, apparently, no longer functions in quite the same way.